Episode 4 of "Sleepy Hollow" opens up back in time. It’s December 1773, and where else would Ichabod Crane be except in Boston Harbor, preparing to dump the king’s tea overboard. While the rest of his fellow patriots do the ax work, he and a few others slip aboard a ship to retrieve a mysterious object. There, they encounter a guard who promptly explodes, mowing down everyone except Ichabod.

In Sleepy Hollow, Season 1, Episode 4, Ichabod Crane has a flashback to his involvement in the Boston Tea Party.Fox

The flashback ends, and Ichabod is speaking to the disembodied voice of a woman while sitting in a car. He has been telling the voice about the Tea Party, and his wife, Katrina, and how he lost her because of a certain irate headless chap on horseback. The tear-soaked voice ends up being an OnStar operator, who got more than she bargained for in hearing Ichabod’s story of love lost, but is none the less moved by the tale. The OnStar operator thanks him for the story, and of course, for using OnStar, freeing him from the locked car. And we find we’re right where we left off last week -- with Jenny Mills’ asylum escape.

MORE TV RECAPS FROM THE STAR-LEDGER

Abbie and Ichabod work out a deal with Captain Irving to buy time to pursue Jenny. The deal is at best ethically questionable, and at worst highly illegal. But this is a show where time travelling horsemen wield assault rifles. So I guess we’ll have to set these implications aside as well, folks. As we found out last week, Jenny clearly has some insight as to what’s coming for Sleepy Hollow. Abbie and Ichabod know she is the key to understanding their plight.

Meanwhile, we catch up with Jenny, who has run to a dive bar to slam down a couple of shots of whiskey, and to retrieve a bag from the bartender. She says to him, “Remember when I told you one day this town is going to go straight to hell? I hate being right.”

Boy, is she ever. Because after the commercial break, that bartender ends up decapitated with his torso impaled on a piece of taxidermy. The responsible parties? As we discover, one of them is a creepy piano teacher with a German accent. The others, they don’t talk much, but they sure do look mean. And they look especially mean while they torture the bartender with some kind of sharp object. Before the requisite blood and guts, the German piano teacher receives a phone call telling him to retrieve an object from Jenny. It’s pretty clear that these guys mean business.

While her friend back at the bar is getting ripped apart, we see Jenny prepping two handguns in a truck stop restroom while staring at a newspaper clipping of her sister. Now, I’m not a detective, but I’d say her motive is pretty obvious here.

Back at the police station, Ichabod and Abbie are sifting through Jenny’s arrest records. Aside from being a career criminal, it turns out Jenny likes to vacation all over the world. And she has had several foster homes. Ichabod and Abbie decide to check in on her last foster family.

At the foster home, Abbie, ever the upstanding citizen, immediately spots signs of neglect and abuse of a foster child. But her reaction goes beyond that of an officer doing their job. It’s clear that she’s incensed. It’s clear that this is personal. After pressing the deadbeat foster mom, Jenny and Ichabod come away with one of Jenny’s old hangouts -- a lakeside cabin 4 miles to the north. But they also get a parting shot from foster mom: “She told me about you -- the good sister that just walked away. Who you really mad at here, girlie? Me, or you?”

The cozy, lakeside bungalow makes for the perfect spot for a family reunion. And nothing says family reunion like two self-assured sisters pointing handguns in each other’s faces. Ichabod, adapting to his modern setting, calls the situation “awkward,” and eventually convinces both sisters to lower their weapons. In the cabin, Ichabod sees a photo of Jenny and Sheriff Corbin. It turns out, the two did know each other. In fact, Corbin employed Jenny to scour the globe for objects that aided him in his paranormal investigations of Sleepy Hollow. Apparently, Jenny says, Corbin knew the end was near: “He felt something was coming for him. And when I asked him what, all he said was ‘death.’”

Sheriff Corbin instructed Jenny to go to the cabin and retrieve something, should he be sent off to meet his maker. A hidden compartment expands out of the cabin’s logs, revealing a mysterious object. Thankfully, the two sisters have someone with them who is well versed in 18th-century relics. Ichabod identifies the object as a sextant -- think of it as a GPS for your 18th-century ocean-faring vessel. Ichabod begins to connect the dots:

Sextants, cartography, mysterious stuff? Yeah, George Washington was into all of that. Remember that Boston Tea Party thing? Yeah, Ichabod and some John Adams guy orchestrated the whole thing. They pulled it off as a part of a mission ordered by George Washington. The mission was to steal some mystery box that a Hessian blew himself up trying to protect -- a box that Ichabod, the lone survivor of the explosion, was able to get back to the general. Ichabod shines a flashlight through the sextant, revealing a map of Sleepy Hollow on the wall. Why did George want the mystery box? Well, I cannot tell a lie: This is a story of revelations, and that one comes after the commercial break. And after the gunfire. Lots of gunfire.

Remember those scary German dudes who turned the bartender into a headless pinata? They’re back. And this time, they’re heavily armed and blowing holes through the cabin. Two of the three manage to get away with the sextant, while Jenny catches the other. Ichabod interrogates the man, who has the same tattoos as the Hessian he beheaded on the battlefield. Now, we begin to get a sense for just how dire the situation is in the Hessian’s revelation.

Though the war ended in the 18th century, the Hessian’s fight for the side of the forces of evil never ended. Ever since, the Hessian explains, they’ve infiltrated Sleepy Hollow -- becoming their friends, learning their names, learning their secrets. And now the sextant has revealed to them another guarded secret -- the location of the Lesser Key of Solomon, a text from the book of revelations that will open a portal to the seventh circle of hell, freeing 72 demons that are trapped there. The Hessian also reveals that they working the service of a chief demon, Moloch -- the same one Jenny and Abbie saw when they were kids. The German, after revealing all of this classified satanic information, does the honorable thing and takes a cyanide shot.

So the map to the Lesser Key of Solomon is gone, and two very unruly Hessians are off to unleash hell on earth. It seems Ichabod, Abbie and Jenny are out of luck. But as luck would have it, Ichabod has a photographic memory, and is able to reconstruct the map from memory. How an 18th-century man is familiar with the concept of photography is a mystery, but there’s only seven minutes left in the episode, so no time to explain. They pinpoint the location of the Lesser Key -- an old Dutch Reformed Church on the outskirts of town.

By the time the good guys get there, the bad guys have already located the key and are opening the portal. The two sisters and Ichabod eventually overtake the Hessians. Ichabod hurls one of them into the abyss, and Jenny, who is in no way an officer of the law, shoots the other at point-blank range, killing him. While this is happening, Abbie tosses the key into the fire, closing the portal and seemingly trapping the 72 demons, for the time being.

Later, Jenny and Abbie share a tender moment in an interrogation room. Abbie tells Jenny she can get her out of the psych hospital if Jenny will consent to her being her legal guardian. “I can’t take back what I did,” Abbie says, “But I can try to make it right.” And closing out the episode, Ichabod, seemingly the best sleuth of the lot so far, confirms that yes, the demon the Hessian mentioned is indeed Moloch (our season one villain?). And he’s the same demon that’s been haunting your nightmares since you were a child.

And on that cheery note, until next week.

Questions:

So, as I mentioned before, we’re left with a ton of questions after this episode. A few that come to mind: What does Moloch want with these girls? What role does the Headless Horseman play in all of this (haven’t seen him in a while)? How does Jenny fit into all of this now? She seems to have joined forces with Ichabod and Abbie, but that’s a pretty dramatic shift from someone who was seemingly planning to gun down their sister earlier in the episode. And at what point is Ichabod going to lose the period garb? Not sure I see it happening anytime soon. What do you think?